ABSTRACT

Much of the literature and most of the instruction in accounting that pertains to ethics is about what individuals should or should not do as practitioners. Individual professionals are guided in their behaviour by a code of ethics or conduct designed to ensure that the profession consists of individuals who behave ethically when exercising their professional skills. The ethical practice of law requires the appropriate legal system if it is to serve the public interest. A major feature of the financial system erected over the last century and a half to cool speculative fevers and, thus, reduce the danger of excessive systemic risk has been the evolution of a system of financial reporting. The utopianism of the economic foundations of the financial reporting system is explained by Marglin. The premises of utopian economics are highly implausible in the sense that they seem not to correspond to the world in which humans actually live.